SCCM Power BI Dashboard Installation and Configuration

In my previous post we saw the steps to package and deploy Power BI Desktop using SCCM. In this post we will focus on SCCM Power BI dashboard installation and configuration. You can also call this as integrating Power BI with SCCM. Microsoft provides you Power BI solution template for System Center Configuration Manager. The template is free to download. You can download the SCCM Power BI solution template here. The solution template is scalable and allows you to customize. You can add information about your users and computers and refine data the way you want to.

When you install this Power BI SCCM template, it is so easy to understand your environment at a glance. At the end of this post you get to see the screenshot of SCCM Power BI dashboard. A Power BI SCCM Dashboard provides high level overview of key SCCM metrics. This allows SCCM admins to quickly identify machines that are not patched with updates, failed mitigations to malware infections etc.

SCCM Power BI Dashboard Prerequisites

Ensure you have a work email address to sign in to Power BI.

Power BI SCCM template needs PowerShell v5 and .NET Framework 4.5.2 to be installed on machine.

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager R2 SP1 or later is required.

To access SCCM data you need a user account with read access to the SCCM DB.

The machine where you install Power BI desktop should have IE version 9 or later. Also the machine should have .NET framework 4.5 installed.

SCCM Power BI Dashboard Installation and Configuration

Lets start SCCM Power BI dashboard installation and configuration. To download the SCCM Power BI template, open browser and open the link. Click Get it Now and sign-in with your work account. On the Getting Started page, click Download. This will download system center configuration manager solution template on to your machine.

Run the Microsoft-SCCM template executable and on setup screen, click Install.

The installation is complete. Click Restart button.

After the reboot, login to the machine and launch the Microsoft-SCCMTemplate application. This will bring you back to Getting Started page. Click Next.

On the Login page, specify your windows credentials to create a recurring schedule. The same credentials will be used to connect to SCCM DB as well. Click Validate and once the validation is successful, click Next.

This step is for connection Power BI to SCCM. On the Source page, specify windows credentials to connect to SCCM database. Click Validate and upon successful validation click Next.

On the Target page, specify the credentials to connect to your SQL database. Validate and click Next.

Since we have not selected any Azure DB options in the above step, we directly go to customize option. On the customize page, leave the options to default, click Validate and click Next.

Most of all you can specify email address to get the updates related to Power BI. You also get a deployment completion email to email address that you supply. Click Run to build the solution template.

After all the steps are complete, click Download Report. Save this template on your computer.

SCCM Power BI Dashboard Configuration

Launch the Power BI desktop and click File > Open and select the solution template. Once you open the solution template, you see something like shown in below screenshot. We need to configure few things, therefore DO NOT click Apply Changes at this step.

On the menu bar, click Edit Queries and then click Edit Queries. Notice on the left pane, you see exclamation icon under Queries. On the Query Editor window, click Edit Credentials. You can specify alternate credentials to access SCCM database. Finally click Connect.

If the credentials entered are correct, you will notice that exclamation symbol is gone. You also see site code, site name, version etc. Click Close and Apply to apply the changes that you just did.

Click on Overview tab at the bottom and you will now see dashboard. The below dashboard shows the information about clients and users that are part of my lab setup. When you install and configure this on your production setup, you would find more information about your SCCM infrastructure. If i get time I will update this post with screenshots of dashboards configured for my organization.

good day Prajwal, i am very new to PowerBI, it might be a stupid question, i need to use PowerBI for our SCCM deployment reporting , i am a bit confused as we have SCCM application server and SCCM SQL Database Server , where should i install/ configure SCCMTemplete for Power BI, on Application server or SCCM SQL DB server, kindly reply. Thanks.

@Ken Piper => have you found a solution ? I m exactly facing the same situation , where machine to run the template is not on the same domain as the SCCM database, therefore as same credential as the service creation is used to connect to the sccm DB , I can not passthrough.

Would be valuable to be able to have different set of credential to connect to the SCCM DB.

Is there any way to export data of a specific deployment status (I have created a task sequence to update some computers on a specific collection) to a PowerBI template or something like that? Or, how can I import that info from SQL Server? As you can see, I’m a newbie on Power BI.

Hi i have a problem with this. In the window System Center Configuration Manager database, I can’t connect to database, error is: This does not look like an SCCM database or you do not have read permissions (Action Failed Microsoft-CheckSCCMVersion — Error ID:(hjwlffqdq7i)) What permission i need in the database?? Thanks

Any way to configure to access an SCCM server in a separate domain(or extract the template from the executable)?. I receive an error

“Login failed for user – View Details The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship” when attempting to connect to SCCMserver.sccmserverdomain with sccmserverdomain user credentials which have dbo permissions to the SCCM/SCCM ReportServices databases when logging in from a workstation on a domain without a trust relationship to sccmserverdomain.